Candide

Raised in a German castle and taught by the philosopher Pangloss that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, the young and trusting Candide believes every word — until a stolen kiss gets him thrown out into a world that seems designed to prove his tutor wrong. So begins the most famous satire of the Enlightenment, a hundred pages of breakneck comedy that carry their hero across two hemispheres and through nearly every disaster the eighteenth century could imagine.

Conscription, war, the great Lisbon earthquake, the fires of the Inquisition, shipwreck, slavery, and betrayal pursue Candide from Europe to South America and back, as he searches for his lost Cunégonde and discovers — and abandons — the hidden golden kingdom of El Dorado. At every fresh catastrophe someone insists that all is, nonetheless, for the best, and Voltaire reports each horror in the same brisk, unruffled, devastating tone, so that the laughter and the outrage arrive together.

Beneath the slapstick lies one of the great arguments in literature: an assault on the philosophical optimism of Leibniz, and on the obscenity of telling the suffering that their pain is necessary to the perfection of the whole. Yet the book ends not in despair but in the most famous resolution in philosophical fiction — Candide’s quiet decision that “we must cultivate our garden,” the modest, immediate good in place of grand systems that explain evil away.

This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation with an editor’s foreword on the satire, its technique, and its attack on optimism, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.